Many fruit and vegetable food products are made by reconstituting or diluting fruit and vegetable pastes. These pastes are typically made from fruit or vegetable purees. There is frequently yield loss associated with the concentration or reduction of the fruit or vegetable purees to pastes prior to their utilization in the manufacture of a desired product. Predicting the yield loss (i.e., screening) provides an important measurement of the amount of starting material required to make a final product of a particular consistency.
Current methods for predicting yield loss in fruit and vegetable pastes tend to be time-consuming and require a large quantity of starting material. Often, the fruit or vegetable paste must actually be made to determine the yield loss. Making the paste requires a large quantity of fruit or vegetable starting material and is time consuming. Pilot Scale screening methods are typically used to predict yield loss. In the case of tomatoes, Pilot Scale screening methods may require as much as two hundred pounds of starting material to produce a sample paste. In addition, the production of the sample paste requires a significant amount of time, i.e., at least three hours per paste. Other methods which require less starting material have been developed. For example, the Bench Scale screening method requires only ten to fifteen pounds of starting material to produce the paste (see, e.g., Karsten Kotte, Influence of polymers and water on the functional properties of foods (2000) (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Davis) (on file with University of California, Davis library) and Maria Salome B. Alviar, The influence of serum constituents on the physico-chemical characteristics of pectins and tomato juice model systems during concentration (1990) (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Davis) (on file with University of California, Davis library). Thus, even for the Bench Scale screening method, the amount of starting material and time required to screen a large number of fruit or vegetable samples is still substantial.
Thus, there is a continuing need in the art for more rapid and efficient screening methods for predicting the amount of yield loss of a fruit or vegetable paste. In particular, a method of screening that does not require the actual production of a fruit or vegetable paste is needed.